Embodiments of the present invention relate to enabling instant communications, and more particularly to techniques for provisioning instant communication capabilities for a community of users.
The number of online sites that support communities of users has grown exponentially in recent years. A very popular example is Facebook (www.facebook.com) that supports a very large online community of users interested in social networking. A user can become a member of an online community usually by registering with a website supporting that community. Once registered, the website provides services that enable the user to interact with other members of the community. In a typical scenario, a user identifies a subset of the members of the community as the user's friends or buddies and interacts with the identified friends or buddies.
Due to the increasing popularity of online communities, providers of online communities are constantly looking for and offering new and better ways in which members of the community can interact with each other. In such an environment, it is desirable that members of a community be able to interact with each other using instant communications including instant messaging (IM). However, many online communities lack the infrastructure to provide instant communications between its members.